4. PREFACE. 
and from additional leading xylographic illustrations. The com- 
menced work would enable any child of average mental capacity, 
even without the aid of a teacher, to name and classify a large 
number of local indigenous plants, would encourage the formation 
of collections, would lead to reflecting observations and cheerful 
recreation, without encroachment on the time needed at school 
for acquiring that first particular and general education, more 
imperative for the practical daily requirements of subsequent 
life. Furthermore the work would not only have proved a guide 
at educational establishments, but would as well have conveyed 
instructions and means for extensive references to all classes of 
our community. The path here indicated for the study of plants 
from the indigenous flora is the only one, which without unpro- 
ductive sacrifice of time can be followed, and which leaves know- 
ledge permanently on the memory. Moreover native plants afford 
in any locality and at any season ready material for instruction, 
while even the most ordinary garden-plants are not at all times 
and at every spot available for illustrative purposes. Nevertheless 
a work, devoted to the vegetation of a country as large as Eng- 
land and Scotland taken together, must necessarily assume the 
dimensions of several hundred pages, even if descriptive details 
are reduced to the extremes of briefness compatible with clearness, 
and even if all needless or avoidable scientific terms are banished 
from the pages of such a work. The first part of the School- 
Flora, one complete in itself, was written and ready for compa- 
ratively cheap issue ; but on Ministerial request the author was 
induced to postpone the more extensive work on the native flora, 
in order that a smaller publication on Gum-trees, Wattles and 
other leading plants of ours should take precedence, according to 
the wishes of his superiors ; and he was furthermore requested to 
abandon as much as ever possible scientific terms, names and 
appellations for the primary work now to be offered. In a first 
